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STAR-CCM+

Discover Better Designs, Faster.

Predicting the real-world performance of a product requires simulation tools that span a variety of engineering disciplines. STAR-CCM+ is an all-in-one solution that delivers accurate and efficient multidisciplinary technologies in a single integrated user interface.

The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capability in STAR-CCM+ offers an efficient and accurate set of fluid dynamics models and solvers with excellent parallel performance and scalability. It provides a solid foundation for multidisciplinary design exploration.

Accurately representing the physical behavior of the different fluid and solid phases is key to capturing the real-world performance of your product. STAR-CCM+ offers a variety of both Eulerian and Lagrangian modeling capabilities to suit your simulation needs.

The discrete element method (DEM) can be used to simulate the motion of a large number of interacting discrete objects (particles), such as the granular flow of aggregates, food particles, metal powders, tablets and capsules, and wheat or grass. STAR-CCM+ is the first commercial engineering simulation tool to include a DEM capability that is fully coupled with numerical flow simulation.

Computational rheology is used to model non-Newtonian/viscoelastic materials in industrial problems. The rheology solver in STAR-CCM+ accurately resolves the dominant physics of complex rheological material flow and helps predict their behavior.

STAR-CCM+ provides insight into the interactions between turbulent flow field and underlying chemistry of reacting flows, helping you improve the trade-off between the performance and emissions of your device for different operating conditions.

The electrodynamic, electrostatic and magnetic potential solvers in STAR-CCM+ accurately predict the interactions between electric, magnetic and flow fields, and facilitate successful designs of electric devices and their cooling.

Significantly improving a battery design across its whole operating range is a challenging task, and involves the simultaneous optimization of numerous parameters. Together with Battery Design Studio, STAR-CCM+ provides a complete simulation environment for the analysis and design of the electrochemical system and detailed geometry of individual battery cells.

Why STAR-CCM+?

Don't just simulate, innovate!

In order to design better products, engineers need to predict the consequence of any design changes on the real-world performance of their product, for better or for worse. Historically those predictions came from hand calculations or from the experimental testing of physical prototypes. Today, engineering simulation offers comprehensive predictions that are usually more accurate and always less expensive than experimental testing. Deployed effectively, these can be used to improve a design through multiple iterations. Ultimately this results in higher quality and more robust products that better fulfill customer expectations. Unlike other methods, engineering simulation also offers the benefit of exploring the performance of a product over the full range of operating conditions that it is likely to face in its working life, rather than just at a handful of carefully chosen “design points.” However, not all engineering simulation tools are created equal. In order to provide a constant stream of relevant engineering data, simulation software must be:

Multidisciplinary
Solving complex industrial problems requires simulation tools that span a multitude of physical phenomena and a variety of engineering disciplines. Real-world engineering problems do not separate themselves into convenient categories such as “aerodynamics”, “hydrodynamics”, “heat transfer” and “solid mechanics”. Only multidisciplinary engineering simulation can accurately capture all of the relevant physics that influence the real-world performance of a product, and can be used to automatically drive the virtual product through a range of design configurations and operating scenarios. By minimizing the level of approximation, engineers can be confident that the predicted behavior of their design will match the real-world performance of their product.

Timely
No matter how “realistic” your simulation is, the data it provides is useless if it does not influence the final design of your product. For simulation to be a useful tool in the engineering design process, predictions must be delivered on time, every time. A late simulation result is not much better than no result at all. Ideally, simulation should generate a constant stream of data that guides and informs the design process through every decision. This is only possible when the simulation process is a robust and automated one. Once an engineer has invested in the creation of a multidisciplinary simulation model, that model should be easily redeployable to investigate a full range of design configurations and operating scenarios, with little or no manual effort from the engineer.

Affordable
Used effectively, engineering simulation consistently delivers a high return on investment (ROI). It provides far more in terms of reduced development costs and increased product revenue than it costs to implement. However, traditional engineering simulation licensing schemes can make the transition from an experimentalist’s mindset of “testing just a few design points” to “investigating the whole design space” prohibitively expensive. This is because most engineering simulation software vendors base their licensing model around the broken paradigm of “the more you use, the more you lose,” charging you per core instead of per simulation and tying customers to an almost linear relationship between the cost of their license and the maximum number of cores that they are allowed to utilize in their simulations. Innovative licensing schemes such as Power Sessions (giving you unlimited cores for a fixed price), Power-on-Demand (enabling you to run on the cloud) and Power Tokens (giving you unprecedented flexibility and facilitating design exploration) render the cost of using engineering simulation affordable.

Backed by experts
An uncomfortable truth about modern engineering is that there really are no easy problems left to solve. In order to meet the demands of industry, it is no longer good enough to do ‘a bit of CFD’ or ‘some stress analysis’. In order to design truly innovative products, engineers are often “pushing back the boundaries of the possible”. This is something that is difficult to achieve in isolation, and often requires competences outside an individual engineer’s immediate area of expertise. In order to be successful, an engineer should have ready access to a community of simulation experts, and ideally an established relationship with a dedicated support engineer who not only understands the engineer’s problems, but can approach the right expert help whenever needed.

See how our customers have been using STAR-CCM+ to generate design improvements and stay ahead of the innovation race.

Designed with STAR-CCM+: Joby Aviation Electric Vehicle

“Joby Aviation's unconventional aircraft designs benefit from an unusual degree of coupling between the propulsion and airframe design; however, this coupling complicates the analysis, since low-order tools are not powerful enough and statistical methods are less useful due to the lack of significant historical data. For these reasons, STAR-CCM+ has been an extremely valuable component of our design and analysis toolkit” - Alex Stoll, Joby Aviation

DNV GL saves APL $30 million in fuel cost per year through hydrodynamic hull optimization

“CFD is like a virtual towing tank. We can make as many modifications as necessary and immediately see what consequences it will have on other areas of the design.” - Tor Svenson, President, DNV-GL

“We are always waiting for the next release, because we know that in that release, there is something valuable for us. We can actually make an enhancement request on the Steve Portal and after one year or so, the capability we asked for is implemented in STAR-CCM+. Amazing, they listen to us!” - Simone Ferrari, Bottero S.p.A.